That's only one way to slice it though. The other is to question the idea of reasonable. Maybe Valve and 3D Realms have it right. Games take time, don't rush them.

Perhaps crunch time exists not to finish on time, but to finish early.

In my experience so far, crunch cycles happen for two reasons.

(a) We bit off more than we can chew and are unable/unwilling to adjust our schedule accordingly.

-or-

(b) Feature Creep after the planning/spec deadline and we're unable/unwilling to adjust the schedule accordingly.

There's a reason for Scotty's old engineering advice, whereby the boss asks for a schedule and the good engineer replies with a schedule about four times as long as he thinks it will actually take.

Of course, if you don't actually have a schedule or any organization supporting scheduling.. well.. then you might as well just be a bunch of guys in a garage.

Unrealistic, bullshit, egregious schedules come from people who do not have any interest in the welfare of the people who build/test/deploy the product. In my experience with this situation it's because the Business team who controls OIBDA (and thereby headcount) doesn't give a shit about "teh details". partly because they can't, partly because they're lazy, but mostly because they don't TRUST engineers. They want it now... <cue Billy Connolly> And I literally finished a meeting like this 30mins ago and am on f13 now cause Im pissed and wanna go home and turn off the lights.

When examining a feature request, the three involved parties look at things differently.

The devs ask "Can we do this before the deadline?"

The QAs ask "Can you make it work before the deadline?"

The managers ask "Can I get that in cornflower blue by EOD?"

And Soln/Jeff, yes, that's pretty much my experience as well, a lot of the scheduling bullshit comes from above... that's why I said "unable" to move the deadline. Management wants it now but doesn't want to pay for it with extra dev/QA time.

Those look like much nicer digs than a garage though, especially the parts that have been.. you know.. painted. I've worked in spaces that are barely-converted or completely unconverted warehouses. Kinda like that basement you've got there, only with a wrecked forklift instead of a makeshift server room.

Heh..it's actually a combined office space + warehouse building. We leased all of the west side office space (the colorful areas you see), the warehouse, as well as a second suite of offices elsewhere in the building.

I tell you what...going from 32 people in an office area smaller than many apartments to everyone actually having room to all breathe in their office at the same time is quite fundamental to general morale...we didn't know how bad it was until we moved on.

Now we just need to get the rest of the roof work done so the sunlight office can have them installed :)

Yeah, I've seen (and worked in) those kind of conjoined office-warehouse buildings. The warehouse parts aren't too bad if you light and partition them properly. ABig sheet of thin canvas works great, especially for the creative sorts, since they can pin stuff to it and you can cut/hang it in irregular shapes and angles to make things less equirectangular.

Hint: plastic garden chair + computer on floor + single bare lightbulb and an open door != 'proper working space'.

I ignored that statement as being just another foaming at the mouth DAOC fanboi who runs around spouting shit like "DOAC has the best pvp EVAR!!" all the time...

Mythic was the first company to have a solid MMO launch of an AAA title that I can remember.

Mythic also has the WORST record of overall class balance at launch of an AAA title that I can think of by a mile.

I've found bad launches are recovered from more quickly then bad design descisions that lead to gross class imbalance but that may just be my "omg I played a blademaster at launch fuck you mythic" side talking.

A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, then that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.-William Gibson

Up until now I think Mythic has had much less turnover than the average MOG dev company so I bet that their average competence level was higher than the others. I understand that Blizzard has lost a ton of good people and EA has always been a revolving door where people abandon ship as soon as their resume looks good enough to get them a job somewhere that's less of a hell hole.

I don't expect that situation at Mythic to last though. According to Lum's blog Matt Firor has just left and I'll bet that he is just the first of a bunch of high profile departures to come.

I ignored that statement as being just another foaming at the mouth DAOC fanboi who runs around spouting shit like "DOAC has the best pvp EVAR!!" all the time...

Me, a fanboi? Hell, I've barely played it, man. I wasn't coming from that angle at all.

Knee-jerk reaction, my bad, f13 has more then its fair share of them tricksie daoc fanbois. I'm not even bothering to get even sort of excited about WAR as I'm sure they will overdo the hype around here as it is.

A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, then that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.-William Gibson

1. I don't think any of the people here who still play DAoC say stuff like "best PvP evar!1!" We say stuff like: despite it's flaws, best fantasy mmo pvp available right now.

The DAoC players here are generally pretty good at pointing out the huge and glaring flaws. Despite those, it's slightly more engaging than the competition.

2. There is no grind in DAoC.

Speed of leveling hasn't been a problem in years. You can solo a toon two high 40's/50's in about 2 days played, depending on class.

Mythic has been pretty good at saying "we fucked up" and fixing the ToA mess. Most artifacts can be done in one or two nights of following around a scheduled artifact zerg. MLs are done 3 levels at a shot now, so that's not bad either.

3. Class balance is fucked. Not because there are a couple of classes that are extremely overpowered mass killing everyone at all times, but because some classes are so specialized or situationally overpowered.

Animists, bainshees, and heretics are massively overpowered in any siege situation. Animists and heretics generally suck balls everywhere else. The balance in aoe available between realms is messed. etc etc.

4. At Schild:

$50 million sounds like a pretty good number, just going off what you can estimate of Mythic's gross revenues for the next 3 years. Gross revenues of $25-30 million a year (based on available pop data). Hell, if you want to make your money back just fire the WAR dev team, reduce overhead, and churn out a unique server type every 6 months or year.

You could milk the game for a long time.

A conditional $20 million to buy WAR if everything stays on target is no skin off EA's back. They either get a complete new MMO or don't pay out a dime.

"ooh look, the definition of that peanut really brings out the log shape in that one, clearly it is the superior turd!"

Competent MMO company...

A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, then that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.-William Gibson

Mother fucking Opera, just figured out how to run the built-in spellchecker it was fucking up f13's. I see it is too late though and I've already constructed another lasting monument to my lack of spelling ability, yay me.

A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, then that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.-William Gibson

1. I don't think any of the people here who still play DAoC say stuff like "best PvP evar!1!" We say stuff like: despite it's flaws, best fantasy mmo pvp available right now.

The DAoC players here are generally pretty good at pointing out the huge and glaring flaws. Despite those, it's slightly more engaging than the competition.

2. There is no grind in DAoC.

Speed of leveling hasn't been a problem in years. You can solo a toon two high 40's/50's in about 2 days played, depending on class.

Mythic has been pretty good at saying "we fucked up" and fixing the ToA mess. Most artifacts can be done in one or two nights of following around a scheduled artifact zerg. MLs are done 3 levels at a shot now, so that's not bad either.

3. Class balance is fucked. Not because there are a couple of classes that are extremely overpowered mass killing everyone at all times, but because some classes are so specialized or situationally overpowered.

Animists, bainshees, and heretics are massively overpowered in any siege situation. Animists and heretics generally suck balls everywhere else. The balance in aoe available between realms is messed. etc etc.

They've been moving in a better direction for a while, yes.

They did it far too late to retain me as a customer.

Out of curiosity- is Ripper fixed yet, or does it still scale off of weapon spec instead of Critical Strike spec?

Regarding the "competent" thing: I could potentially agree that Mythic is the most competent MMG company that EA could reasonably expect to purchase.

That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell. -Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

There are lots of queued games now? I thought that was the exception (and mostly WoW being too popular). SOE, if you forget the SWG team, is pretty strong. Planetside (will we EVER see another MMOFPS with as much FPS as PS?), EQ (the new M59), and especially EQ2 which has really improved to the point where it's actually enjoyable to play for the most part. Turbine was good with Asheron's Call, and DDO didn't seem to bad.